One thing I'm trying not to forget is that performing Shadowplay is supposed to be a dangerous task. One character mentioned long ago that mnemosurgeons often die young, highlighting how exceptionally skilled Chromedome must be.

It would be interesting to know the sort of numbers who have endured Shadowplay, and the impact Senator Shockwave's last minute amendment (requiring two signature on the assessment) would have had on further operations.

What's also interesting is that Shockwave's amendment was conducted in a secret session, and the timing was so close to Megatron's 'personality adjustment' via Trepan. So Shockwave knew full well how much danger Megatron was in, and was trying to save him.

I'm hoping we get a backstory showing how close at all times Shockwave was to death via the Senate. All the plans and tricks he was using to subvert their dodgy doings etc. He was a proper hero of Cybertron!

Well...yes, absolutely. I don't dispute that the pre-war Transformers have a very different idea of right and wrong than we do. But I don't think that's necessarily a reflection of their mechanical nature.

I know. I simply put that forth as one possibility, as biology does inherently influence a species' society. It could have no effect whatsoever, depending on what the people writing it decide. I'm just saying that, were I writing it, it's an idea I might explore.

Ultimately, the only point I was trying to make is that, if the Transformers were an actual alien race being studied rather than characters in a book, we could no more apply our social mores or ethics than we could our notions of biology. Now, in the context of the story, I agree that it's a notion ripe for conversation, and could serve as a mirror for our own society.

I honestly think some of it may come down to Roberts' intent, but I don't know. I will say these threads have given me more hope for the quality of the comics than I'd have ever thought possible.

My first thought was that Trailbreaker isn't dead, not because he was insufficiently killed but because they're in an ethics classroom. I don't think any of the business with the wounded Vos and the DJD was real, it was done sort of illusion created to provide the very ethical debate it provided.

That would be super-hilarious and trollish, but if that was the case I think they'd have revealed it in this issue.

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Originally Posted by Death's Head

My personal preference would be that the brain module 'is' the Transformer in question, with the spark essentially being like the human heart - and therefore theoretically replaceable, but definitely vital to continued existence. But that's just me being an old Marvel fan!

I know where you're coming from. If it was up to me Transformers would just be code executing on brain modules without any of silly metaphysical 'spark' mumbo-jumbo at all. I think it makes them far more distinctly "alien" if they're literal machine-people than if they're powered by magic souls. Unfortunately that ship sailed a long time ago.

That said, I think Roberts has done a good job of highlighting their mechanical nature in MTMTE. Mnemosurgery, body-gloving and the like are exactly the sort of concepts that I've always wanted to see in TF fiction, the kind of thing that you can easily do with machines that you can't with humans without a massive amount of technobabble. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy the series so much.

But even here, the quasi-magical sparks act as a limit on what you can do. For instance, you probably couldn't copy five of your soldiers' minds, store them in data crystals for four million years and then install them into new bodies on an alien world (am I the only one who wanted Tracks, Skids and the like to run into their original selves on Cybertron during the Marvel run?). Even the Headmaster stuff from Furman's early work retroactively makes no sense. Shouldn't Sunstreaker have died when his brain module was hundreds of miles away from his spark?

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Originally Posted by Death's Head

Incidentally, I can't be the only one who wishes James had been able to keep the phrase 'morphcore' as opposed to 't-cog' - it's far more poetic.

Was "morphcore" a TMUK thing? I can't recall ever hearing anyone but fans use it.

"Transformation cog" is way more dry and clinical, but it has "transform" in the name and it's been around since the cartoon used it in 1986, so I think it was always destined to be the term that'd stick.

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Originally Posted by Death's Head

Ah, I'd forgotten all about 'ratioism' - yup, I think you've hit the nail on the head there! And it's interesting to note that, once the war begins, the Autobots start building 'Made-To-Order' soldiers...

(Megatron was right!)

Oooh...hadn't made that connection myself. The Decepticons did the exact same thing, though. I wonder how long it took for them to start plopping sparks into freshly-built troops and which side did it first, because it seems like it would be a terrible violation of the ethics that both Prime and Megatron claim to uphold.

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

It's lovely isn't it? I didn't mind the over comics this month (and the issue before of RID was actually very good fun), but Roberts is simply working on all sorts of different levels and even when he has a misstep (as all serial fiction writers do from time to time) those are usually more interesting than many other writer's successes.

I'd agree with this. RIDTransformers: No Subtitle is a perfectly serviceable book, and easily better than most of the output that IDW and Dreamwave have given us in the last decade and a half. Not without flaws and sometimes a bit plodding, but it's intelligently-written and reasonably entertaining. Its' main problem is that it's being released at the same time as a book that uses TFs as a vehicle to explore sci-fi ideas and character relationships in a way that we've never seen before, which leaves Barber's work feeling a bit generic in comparison.

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

It surprised me as well (as said, when I first read Roberts saying he was surprised by the reaction I thought he meant to the moral dilemma), it's hard to judge people's reasoning in just 144 characters, but based on the retweets I saw it's possible people were feeling down about two issues of alternate versions of the characters being shown horribly killed being followed by one of them being horribly killed for real, they think the book has become too dark and stopped being any fun.

Really? I guess I can see that considering the "light-hearted, no-consequences adventure" feel the early issues had, but the book's been pretty dark since Shadowplay started, at least. Honestly it doesn't feel like much (if any) of a departure to me, especially keeping in mind the sorts of horrors Roberts wrought with Nick Roche in LSOTW.

Actually, in spite of my constant bitching about how stupid the DJD are, I think the last three issues have been the best since the early Delphi two-parter. This issue in particular is fantastic for all the questions it raises. Which you'd think would have come up earlier, what with this being my ninth post in the thread...

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

Chromedome was similarly smug and enjoying lording it up over Overlord when he was in his head (and of course, at the time of these flashbacks was in the same line of work as Trepan), but still personally thought he was doing the right thing. Some people are still just gits even when they think they're working for the greater good.

Oh, absolutely! I'd be hard-pressed to say that Chromedome is a good person either though, even in the present day. He's a messed-up person who continues to bad things in spite of repeated promises to his significant other that he'll stop, and in a civil society he'd probably be in jail. A great character to read about, but not the sort of person I'd be comfortable being around in real life.

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

I think the not being able to hold it against Worf thing was due to the 24th century humans being such a homogenised dull same minded bunch (look at Riker in the Host, he doesn't even balk at have a slug put in his belly and controlling his body to turn him into Doctor Crusher's sex slave even though that would I say give most normal people at least a moments pause) that the idea of one of them not doing The Right Thing as defined by Federation morality. They have the right to chose but they'd all male the same choice anyway.

True story: when we watched The Host a few months ago my wife and I were both outraged that Crusher and her pet slug weren't tossed in jail on rape charges. The scene at the end after Odan has been put in a female host was pretty damned offensive too. Just a terrible, terrible episode all around. Roddenberry hippy crap at it's finest.

DS9 and Voyager had some very unique and interesting human characters though, so maybe it's not an issue with 24th century humanity so much as it is with Picard's HR selections? Though considering the Federation ignores blatant acts of war by around six foreign governments per year based solely on what the Enterprise encounters, maybe not...

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

Which is of course why Worf so quickly became such a popular character despite being intended to just stand about on the bridge doing nothing, as an alien Roddenbery didn't force him into his post Motion Picture hippy ideals and the guy got to have edges of a sort none of the humans (except possibly Picard, possibly because Stewart just added all sorts of layers to his performance).

I think you're dead-on with that. It's no coincidence that Worf and Data were the most popular characters on the show with Picard close behind. The human characters just didn't get anything to work with, and aside from Stewart the actors weren't good enough to elevate the banal tripe in the script into something better. Geordi and Crusher in particular don't seem to have any personality at all, and it took Troi until mid season six before she was anything other than a joke character. Pulaski was cool, though, and it's always made me sad that she was only in the one season and left before the show really hit its stride.

(Riker on the other hand started out as interesting, but his character arc reached its' natural conclusion in Best of Both Worlds and poor Jonathan Frakes had nothing to do for the next four years and most of the movies.)

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

At its worst it meant the Klingon was just used to voice whatever stupid violent/bigotted viewpoint the other characters wouldn't be allowed to (The Outcast being the worst example where he suddenly gets the put forward the sexist and possibly homophobic comments out of nowhere) but it overall made him bloody awesome.

The funny thing about that is that Worf's "backwards savagery" is right 90% of the time, while Picard/Riker/Troi/whoever's hippy nonsense usually results in people dying and stuff blowing up for 40 minutes before they work out a "peaceful" solution.

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

I actually think Sisko would have made Worf do it, he seemed to have a lot less patience with indulging his crew generally and tended to be more pragmatic than Picard.

Sisko was awesome though. I think he would have resolved 75% of the TNG episodes twenty minutes in by punching the alien of the week in the face.

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

To really tangent, I liked the idea in the SF Debris review of Sins of the Father, where it was pointed out just a few weeks after Worf let a Romulan die he suddenly finds himself the centre of a Romulan plot to break up the Federation/Klingon alliance that should have seen him executed and still winds up with him dishonoured. Looks like he pissed the Romulans off.

I didn't notice that, but you know...that makes perfect sense. Worf in particular has messed up so many Romulan plots over the course of the series that the ones he meets on DS9 probably consider him some sort of boogyman.

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Originally Posted by inflatable dalek

All the really dodgy stuff we've seen Whirl do though has been since he was kicked out of the Wreckers (at least since joining the Autobots anyway) for attempted assisted suicide. Last Stand actually suggest that as tough and nasty as they are they still had to obey rules of war- at least during the time Springer was with them anyway as he's surprised and shocked by Impactor's crossing of the line.

Fair enough. But we know Whirl was scum before the war, and he's still scum after the war ended. I think it's reasonable to assume that he was scum during the war too, and even if his commanders managed to keep him from doing anything too abominable he's still not remotely the sort of lilly-white hero the Autobots want to be seen as.

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Originally Posted by Dead Man Wade

Ultimately, the only point I was trying to make is that, if the Transformers were an actual alien race being studied rather than characters in a book, we could no more apply our social mores or ethics than we could our notions of biology.

I just think the same thing is equally applicable to other human cultures, is all. How often in our history have their been disastrous conflicts because the two sides' ideas of how to live life were fundamentally incompatible? It still happens even now, as the trail of bloody wars in recently "freed and democratized" nations can attest to. So I don't necessarily agree that the Transformers' biology would necessarily make them any easier or harder to understand than other humans.

They're different from us in different ways than other humans are, but they're not necessarily any more different. Does that make sense?

As an IDW-specific question I'm not sure it's one we can answer (though something very much like this happened in an old BotCon comic). They've never really told us what the spark and brain module do in this universe. Is the spark just their "life force", and the brain module the seat of their identity and consciousness? Or is the spark where their mind lives and the brain module is just the hardware it executes on and uses to interface with their body? Or is it some odd mix of the two? I'm not sure the even the Transformers themselves know the answer to that, and they might consider it a theological question more than a scientific one since neither part can survive or function without the other.

You know, this is a tough thing to figure out properly. Every time I think I've found a reasonable explanation, I think of something that makes it not quite work.
Until comic explanation/word of JimBob says otherwise, my inclination is to say that the spark and brain module are sort of two manifestations of the same basic thing. They're separate, linked entities, and altering one affects the other (so mnemosurgery uses the brain as an interface point to read or alter the personality in both the brain and the spark). Stab a spark, it's gonna collapse and kill the bot without sufficient medical care. Crush a brain module, same thing.

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What I wonder is why they consider the transformation cog to be an equally vital part as the brain and spark. It seems like they can be swapped from person to person easily enough, and Triple-M are proof that you can survive without one pretty much indefinitely. I understand that transformation is the core of their identity as a race, but the whole "Rossum's Trinity" thing implies that damage to any of the three can kill you. Though I suppose that might just be a leftover Functionist thing -- if you can't transform, you no longer have a place in the Grand Cybertron Taxonomy and might as well be dead.

I would liken the t-cog to an important organ, like a kidney or liver. You can extract one surgically and/or transplant one from a living or recently dead donor (and depending on things, you can live without one or with a damaged one), but if you get stabbed in the kidney or liver, you're probably dead in short order.

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Originally Posted by Death's Head

(Outside of the fiction, Rossum's Trinity is probably an attempt to clear up the fact that in Last Stand... James and Nick had TFs die by brain module destruction, whereas previously we had seen the worst criminals in Garrus 9 stripped down to the spark.)

I think they could explain that away by the spark extraction being a carefully done surgical procedure with the intent of the subject surviving, while brain bullets clearly aren't.

They're different from us in different ways than other humans are, but they're not necessarily any more different. Does that make sense?

I understand where you're coming from, I just wholeheartedly disagree. A sentient robotic race lacking sexual dimorphism, evolving/built on a world of metal, in a whole different part of the universe? I see no reason they'd have any common point of reference.

Yeah, "Rossum's Trinity" deals nicely everything you've said there - a sudden trauma to any of those organs (a brain bullet, a blow to the spark or the t-cog) causes feedback that blows out the other organs. It's an elegant explanation and adds another little layer to Transformer culture. I also like that even the best surgeons don't have full knowledge of the nature of Cybertronian life - it's a fitting parallel with humanity.

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I know where you're coming from. If it was up to me Transformers would just be code executing on brain modules without any of silly metaphysical 'spark' mumbo-jumbo at all. I think it makes them far more distinctly "alien" if they're literal machine-people than if they're powered by magic souls. Unfortunately that ship sailed a long time ago.

Back in TMUK, which had to fit together Marvel and Beast Wars, we sort of fudged it by explaining that what later generations would call a "spark" was actually the life-giving energy of the Matrix - it would generally be diffuse around the Transformer's body, but if they were reduced to a brain module, say, then the energy would be concentrated there - so when Walter Barnett transplanted the Throttlebot's brains into toy cars their 'sparks' effectively went with them.

I think when sparks were first introduced in Beast Wars it was a nice addition to the mythos. Their presence certainly never cut down on instances of Transformers being disassembled or blown to bits and surviving, and it was explicitly stated that a spark can't exist outside of a body.

Sadly Beast Machines tossed all that out of the window by having sparks float around willy-nilly, which begs the question of why Transformers would have bodies in the first place; they may as well be energy beings, or something. I like my Transformers to be physical creatures - and like you say, James has done a lot towards bringing back some of the visceral nature of the old UK comics (well, visceral to a kid - I remember the dismembered Cyclonus on Shockwave's wall giving me a few disturbed nights).

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Even the Headmaster stuff from Furman's early work retroactively makes no sense. Shouldn't Sunstreaker have died when his brain module was hundreds of miles away from his spark?

Also, what was going on with Prime moving his mind into his trailer, even as his spark was getting squeezed by Megs?

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Was "morphcore" a TMUK thing? I can't recall ever hearing anyone but fans use it.

"Transformation cog" is way more dry and clinical, but it has "transform" in the name and it's been around since the cartoon used it in 1986, so I think it was always destined to be the term that'd stick.

I think he first used it in Eugenesis, but it also snuck into Last Stand of the Wreckers - even ended up with a wiki page.

Eugenesis also gave us the term 'changeform' in place of the sentence-stopper that is 'alt mode', which I'm not a fan of either.

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Oooh...hadn't made that connection myself. The Decepticons did the exact same thing, though. I wonder how long it took for them to start plopping sparks into freshly-built troops and which side did it first, because it seems like it would be a terrible violation of the ethics that both Prime and Megatron claim to uphold.

Hopefully, with the excellent investigation into Megatron's history and beliefs that we're getting at the moment, we'll see a bit more of this play out. The DJD represent the ultimate violation of what pre-war Megatron believed, and with them on the scene it's inevitable that we'll see a bit more of how Megatron's vision became so corrupted.

As for Prime, well, I do enjoy how the Autobots are portrayed as far from lily-white. You say that Whirl's a bastard, but when the Lost Light encounters Snap Trap's crew look how many Autobots are depserately spoiling for a fight. It's telling that alien races don't give much of a toss about the difference between Autobot and Decepticon.

I know where you're coming from. If it was up to me Transformers would just be code executing on brain modules without any of silly metaphysical 'spark' mumbo-jumbo at all. I think it makes them far more distinctly "alien" if they're literal machine-people than if they're powered by magic souls. Unfortunately that ship sailed a long time ago.

There does always seem to have been that desire to have them be more than "Mere" robots, even back as far as Budiansky's non-mystical original idea for the Matrix they're still something that can only be given "Life" by a very specific SUPER computer program (with Vector Sigma in the cartoon basically being the same thing). I guess creators at the time were worried about the question of why they (or anyone else for that matter) just doesn't build legions of the buggers, or even that a robot in and of itself might not be special enough to carry a series.

Oddly as it's now the default version, I don't think that if Transformers was created today anyone working on it would feel the need to do what Furman firmly nailed down and bring in an non-technological origin them.

I think these days mainstream audiences are much more down with the idea of normally built robots being alive without any extra bells and whistles. It arguably stated with Blade Runner (though of course when Furman did Legacy that was still a disappointing box office failure rather than a cultural cornerstone) but things like- and let's connect the tangents of this thread together- Data through to the recent BSG remake exploring the ideas of whether a robot can have a "Soul" (with the answer being basically "Yes") successfully would make Primus redundant.

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Really? I guess I can see that considering the "light-hearted, no-consequences adventure" feel the early issues had, but the book's been pretty dark since Shadowplay started, at least. Honestly it doesn't feel like much (if any) of a departure to me, especially keeping in mind the sorts of horrors Roberts wrought with Nick Roche in LSOTW.

It is odd, and probably shows that the opinions of people on the internet are worthless .

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True story: when we watched The Host a few months ago my wife and I were both outraged that Crusher and her pet slug weren't tossed in jail on rape charges. The scene at the end after Odan has been put in a female host was pretty damned offensive too. Just a terrible, terrible episode all around. Roddenberry hippy crap at it's finest.

It's just really weird and icky, and the latter part is problematic as a symptom of modern Trek's bizarre attitude of insisting on having analogies for gay people instead of just featuring gay people. Which would be like 60's Trek having no black people in it, just that episode with the Riddler looking like Two Face. Certainly when you get to Enterprise, on the same network as Buffy, the absence of homosexuality in the future is at its most annoying.

It's telling that for DS9 they basically chucked everything out about the Trill bar the "Slug in belly" thing (Dax can even use the transporter!) and made it a more palatable merging of minds. Considering Dax's make up was only changed at the last second from the version used in the TNG episode (IIRC she even filmed a couple of days of the pilot in it before it was abandoned for affecting how teenage boys might masturbate over her so they pumped for less intrusive dots) I think if they'd known that basically nothing but the basics of the concept would remain they have made it some other sort of parasite/symbiont and changed the name of the species.

Mind, if you want to retroactively throw the DS9 version of the species on the Next Gen version it becomes much more fun to imagine Riker was only playing along with being possessed so as to tick Crusher off his "Women I've had list" without having a similar "accident" to that which Picard arranged for her husband.

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Pulaski was cool, though, and it's always made me sad that she was only in the one season and left before the show really hit its stride.

I was amazed to discover how upopular she was generally, I guess because she was put in such stark opposition to the show's most beloved character. And fair enough, the attempts to replicate Spock/McCoy don't quite work (Spock could give as good as he gets in a way Data doesn't making it seem more bullying than banter), but even as a kid it felt like she was on such an obvious arc where she'd learn to respect Date and become fast friends with him that never bothered me.

Indeed, I don't think there's any actual antagonism between them after the Sherlock Holmes episode which is fairly early in the season.

I certainly always preferred her to Crusher and Troi anyway (it seems that, whilst the close knit cast might have been a big bonus in many ways, it was a drawback there as everyone else involved treated the actress rather badly for replacing their mate and it wasn't a happy time for her as a result).

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(Riker on the other hand started out as interesting, but his character arc reached its' natural conclusion in Best of Both Worlds and poor Jonathan Frakes had nothing to do for the next four years and most of the movies.)

Such a shame as Frakes is a very likeable actor, it's telling they seriously considered killing him off and replacing him with Thomas in season 6.

What has always baffled me is how poorly Worf is treated in the films. As said, he's the third most popular character but First Contact (which comes in the middle of his time on DS9 so him pulling double duty isn't the issue) is the only one to give him a decent role. Which is especially ludicrous when you consider his personal nemesises are the secondary villains in Generations.

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Sisko was awesome though. I think he would have resolved 75% of the TNG episodes twenty minutes in by punching the alien of the week in the face.

Well, post season 4 Sisko. It always amused me how they cast an actor like Avery Brooks with very specific strengths and then took so long to write the character to any of those strengths. Maybe they were trying to avoid the Mean Black Mother****er clichés but it does leave early Sisko a bit dull and lost in his own show (apparently Tony Todd came fairly close to getting the part and he'd have done the introspective thoughtful Sisko of the first few years much better).

Or maybe Sisko went bald because of the onset of a sudden testosterone increase.

This is your More Than Meets the Eye thread.

One aspect of military discipline the characters in this issue really fail at is security. Fair enough if Bluestreak and Mainframe don't wish to contribute but they've just found a notorious Decepticon who always travels as part of a group. Going back to the shuttle shouldn't have been an option, they should have been ordered to search the rubble for any other surprises and then secure the perimeter. And as both the ranking officer and security chief it should have been Trailbreaker's job to order them to do that and not to take any shit if they refused.

One other idea might have been to throw his works-even-when-he's-drained panic forcefield around himself, First Aid and Vos before staring the operation, with Mainframe and Bluestreak on guard outside it. Then if things go wrong, the others have 30 minutes to either prepare to deal with Vos or simply escape (in retrospect of course that would have been a Bad Idea because of Kaon, but it's still a thought that might have occurred at the time).

A thought has occured to me over the last couple of issues regarding the DJD and all their loveliness. It goes a little something like this...

The DJD are not controlled at all by Megatron or any of the Decepticon high command. They are a bunch of extreme extremists who slaveishly enforce the basis of the decepticon belief while actually not being interested at all in it - somewhat similar to football hooligans who are die-hard loyal to their football club without actually being interested in the football. For them, it's all about the "decepticon cause". As such, while Megatron has been able to use them to keep his troops in line at times, he would not neccesarily be a supporter of them. They are simply too dangerous to engage. In truth he probably knows himself that the Megatron that Tarn and the boys worship is not, and never has been, him.

In a way, they may even reflect the KGB of the decepticons. Becoming insidious and lethal to their own side, just to justify their own existence but never actually contributing to the war effort. Sure, they've slaughtered autobots but only because they are sadistic killers. This may help explain why Megatron has never set the DJD on the autobots or used them as a spear head. He simply isnt in a position to give the order.

This also makes me think that if anyone is going to be revealed as the secret behind Tarns mask that it may indeed by Terminus. As punishment for his support of Megatrons writings, Terminus is re-wired to be a slave to the doctrine to the point of madness. Disgusted by how his friend has been corrupted somewhat by his words, megatron removes the early dedication. It might also be another layer as to Megatrons hatred of brain intrusion - not just what he experienced but what he saw it do to Terminus.

Anyway, sorry to derail this Star Trek thread. It's fantastic reading, even if the thread title may need altering

However, unlike "Senator" Shockwave, there were various clues spread out and people "found" this out before Roberts intended us to. So this is like the second or third time he's thrown an alternate bone our way just to confuse us.

Everything is there people, laid out...

DJD-semi centered three parter -just- before the final part in the pre-war trilogy, with Roller front and centre in one of the covers, all the while the DJD just hang out and watch Megatron's post war declaration.

But without Ratchet or Prime on board what impact does Tarn being Roller really have? Surely at this point in the story it's got to be someone tied to Megatron. Or even this: an absolute nobody, who's rabid commitment to the Decepticon cause saw him elevated to head of DJD, if only to keep him out of Megatron's way?

If it is indeed Roller [now I'm trolling you all :P ] it's most certainly by choice.

Guy has every right and reason to go with Megatron--as Megatron, at that point, is primarily against the Senate, who essentially double crossed the Iacon Police force with thugs and knocked him unconscious.

One thing that many people seem to forget though...is that there's a mole in Orion's team from Shadowplay, as the Senate was tipped to their plot and hiding of Senator Shockwave.

If it is indeed Roller [now I'm trolling you all :P ] it's most certainly by choice.

Guy has every right and reason to go with Megatron--as Megatron, at that point, is primarily against the Senate, who essentially double crossed the Iacon Police force with thugs and knocked him unconscious.

One thing that many people seem to forget though...is that there's a mole in Orion's team from Shadowplay, as the Senate was tipped to their plot and hiding of Senator Shockwave.

That all makes a lot of sense. I can see a confrontation between roller and megs where roller points out the lack of law and order within the deception ranks. Megs offers him the job, and he takes things a little too far. Or maybe he is the first tarn but is taken out by someone even more extreme.